The terror of neutrality

continued Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:

I get so excited sometimes, seemingly out of all proportion to whatever might appear to be the immediate cause. It is evident that I am tapping into something larger, something that the saints and mystics have also partaken of. I’ve had less of it than them but I make no bones about it, I call it ecstasy and ask for more and more.

Ecstasy didn’t vanish from the world with the delirious saints of the middle ages. It is not something to be restricted to a single time, place, or creed. If it ever was here then it will be here now, and if it is here now then I want some for myself. I’ve had a taste of it – now again, here and there – I’ve tasted enough to know that, elusive though it is, it exists for real, in this world right here, and even in my godless world.

Great joys and excitements lifting me up out of myself, overturning my surroundings, leaving everything transformed and glittering. My body seems to swell up inside itself, I feel my heart expanding and my eyes opening wider, my nostrils inhale lavishly, all the air about me seems suddenly fresher, purer, and the simple act of breathing becomes a pleasure to be lingered over, deeply.

My body feels no tension but is keen and alert, my mind races and rolls about inside my head. The world no longer offers me any resistance, I move about in it as in my own home, but my own home encountered for the first time, all new.

If I believed in any god it would clearly be enveloping me right about now; as is, I am just adrift, in ecstasy, in the space god left behind. The mystics themselves, the religious mystics, were taken in their ecstasies beyond the gods they thought they had known; they submitted to stranger embraces, declared all that they had professed to know about their gods beforehand to be inadequate, outmoded, null and void. It’s no different…

Believers and non-believers alike, we are all carried off, into the ecstatic unknown. We shed our old notions, smile over the precipice, give ourselves up to something neither lot of us can properly understand…

http://www.sanguinearts.org.uk/dunword.htm

continued Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:

‘Ecstasy is not something that can be accessed on demand, but there may be little tricks and methods we can use in order to make ourselves more amenable to ecstasy when it does come. One useful technique is the spontaneous performance of abnormal acts. The most notorious incident in the life of the thirteenth century mystic Angela of Foligno occurred one Maundy Thursday when she and her companion were bathing the sores of some lepers. Angela had the idea of drinking the water she had used to bathe the sores, and when a scab that had been floating in the water became stuck in her throat she declared that it tasted like the Eucharist. Remarkable though the story is in terms of sheer disgust, what I find most impressive about it is the impulsive character of Angela’s action: the way she made the decision, seemingly from out of nowhere, to drink the scabby water. Benedict did something comparable in his decision to jump into the thornbushes. Normally, when one is confronted with a glass of water that has been used to bathe a leper’s sores, one does not then ask oneself whether to drink it or leave it alone; and normally, when confronted with a group of bushes with sharp thorns, one does not pose the question as to whether one should leap into them or pass on by. These questions, under normal circumstances, simply do not arise; and the water is left undrunk and the bushes are walked away from. But both Benedict and Angela did something extraordinary in these two stories, they created a choice where there had not seemed to be one. To do so opens up a kind of vacuum, because all of a sudden one’s actions are not being informed by the trends of thousands of years of human culture. Within this vacuum may arise the possibility of achieving ecstasy (quite possibly Benedict felt it in the bushes; certainly Angela felt it drinking the water as she tells us of the resulting “intense sweetness” that “lasted all the way home […] just as if I had received Holy Communion”).

Although I have done nothing on the level of Benedict or Angela, I have made some modest attempts at putting the principle into practice. It feels good to try taking steps outside of normal procedure, to forget momentarily the standard approaches and treat situations as if they were being faced for the very first time in the world, without the benefits or impediments of established knowledge. One example took place on the evening of 28/08/06, significant because that dates it to the day immediately prior to my great ecstasy noted a few pages back. I was attempting to cross Park Lane and took the subway that runs under that road; and coming towards the middle point where the tunnel dips down to its lowest level I found that a section of about ten metres in length had become flooded and was under several inches of water. Rather than turn back I suddenly decided to carry on walking and did not take my shoes and socks off or roll up my trousers but continued straight ahead and let the water flow in. This action, as it happened, did not constitute an ecstatic experience – I was laughing as I walked through the water but nothing more – but I believe that it did in some way help to prepare me for the ecstasy I would receive on the following day. The incident in the tunnel was one of a number of similar actions I made in the days leading up to the 29th (the first of my attempts to shower in the rain on my terrace also dates to this time), and together they helped to get me into the habit of casting aside normal patterns of behaviour that is perhaps a prerequisite for the subsequent receipt of ecstatic experience.’

http://www.sanguinearts.org.uk/dunword.htm

Duncan Ward

This is the artist who inspired me out of my art block. He has done a series of 50 or so drawings from previous performances of his. His drawing is incredibly fresh and interesting with no pretentions. His performances are viseral which revisited as drawings become incredibly exciting and unusual depictions of himself. Here is a link to his show at the Whitstable Bianale

http://www.kentculturalbaton.com/artists/duncanwar..

also the best thing I’ve read for ages from Duncan –

Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:

‘A scattering of caves towards the top of a mountain, the grottoes look out over the precipice, the sides of the mountain dropping sharply away beneath them; far below forests of holmoak descend right to the bottom of the valley in an impenetrable mass of leaf and shadow; concealing birds, rabbits, deer, and boar; up near the top the caves nestle between great wedges of grey rock stacked up steeply straining for the summit; silence at the mountaintop; and tangles of nettle, thickets of bush and bramble among the slanting rocks.

Here once the hermit saints would have mortified themselves, throwing their naked bodies down and rolling in the thorns. Splendid men, whatever you think of their spiritual views. It is ultimately a human gesture, rolling around like that, their blood leaking into the dirt. There was a nice thrashing of human limbs there, whatever it did or didn’t do for the soul.

Nowadays, that sort of thing is left to the video artists. They do it in a different spirit perhaps, but it is good that someone is continuing the work.

Those are the fun parts of Christianity, the crazy bits where it was interesting.

It would have been painful but it must have been fun: rolling around like that, like maniacs, in the thornbushes, under golden skies. No matter what your opinions about religion, faith cannot be all bad if it gives you courage to do things like that.

Those prickly bushes must have died back and regrown through a lot of generations since they last snagged human flesh on their thorns. They aren’t trampled down so much now.

Once upon a time they were beaten this way and that by the writhings of holy men. Their branches were twisted under arms and legs and they bit back with their prickles, carving up flesh, mopping up blood on their leaves until they were stained quite red. They were carnivorous plants back then; they had blood on their lips, they gorged themselves on meat.

Nobody rolls in the thornbushes these days. The bushes sit tight in their soil, their spikes are sharp as ever but no-one wants to utilise them in that way. They hold still, undisturbed, the same as any other bushes. The blood they once drew has long since seeped away.’

http://www.sanguinearts.org.uk/dunword.htm

After a lovely long Summer holiday with plenty of distance from my ideas of last year, I feel refreshed and ready to tackle the second and last year of my MA at Wimbledon.

I have visited a few shows in the Summer which I will review. I have done very little art work, initially having a block from too much intellectual thought, then from having the kids at home and wanting to garden and play etc. I’ve had many ideas and discarded most of them. I thought I would do something completely different this year, but now I have decided to carry on where I left off, but with renewed confidence that I am on the right track and I do know what I’m doing.